K I M B E R LY C H O N G

B E S T P R A C T I C EManagement Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China

best practice

best practicemanagement consulting and

the ethics of financialization in china

kimberly chong

duke university press | Durham and London | 2018

© 2018 Duke University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞Text design by Julienne AlexanderCover design by Matthew TauchTypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataNames: Chong, Kimberly, [date—] author.Title: Best practice : management consulting and the ethics of financialization / Kimberly Chong.Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: lccn 2018008216 (print) | lccn 2018010129 (ebook)isbn 9781478002376 (ebook)isbn 9781478000693 (hardcover : alk. paper)isbn 9781478000884 (pbk. : alk. paper)Subjects: lcsh: Business consultants— China. | Business ethics— China. | Financialization— Moral and ethical aspects— China.Classification: lcc hd69.c6 (ebook) | lcc hd69.c6 c474 2018 (print) | ddc 001— dc23lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018008216

Cover art: Friendship Square, Dalian, China. Photo by Tony Vingerhoets / Alamy Stock Photo.

Acknowl edgments viiIntroduction 1

1 high performers: The Making of Financialized Subjects 35

2 evaluating humans: Financial Rationality and Practices of Performance- Related Pay 64

3 reducing costs: Shared Ser vice Centers, Labor, and the Outsourcing Rationale 91

4 training value: The Moral and Po liti cal Proj ect of Selling Consultancy 110

5 client sites: Liminality, Modernity, and Per for mances of Expertise 131

6 building a paradise: Post- Mao Visions of Transformation 151

7 con spic u ous ethicizing: Corporate Culture, CSR, and Corporate Subjectivity 172

Conclusion 193Notes 203references 221Index 241

contents

many people have made this book pos si ble, not least the women and men of the management consultancy that I pseudonymously refer to as Systeo. In an environment that makes a virtue of efficiency and being busy, Systeo employees of all se niorities took time out to explain their work. In addition to their patience and enthusiasm, the research benefited hugely from their help in expanding my access within the consultancy. As any ethnographer of organ izations knows, getting clearance for entry is just the first step— access is constantly being renegotiated once you are inside. Having research subjects who make it their personal mission to ensure that you see as much pos si ble, who find ways to get you involved in the day- to- day life of the organ ization, and who offer you a place to stay should you need it was a dream I could not have hoped for. Their warmth and generosity were not restricted to the working context. Although I do not focus on con-sul tants’ personal lives, I greatly appreciated the invitations to dinner, the theater, and the shopping mall. Through these experiences I gained a much richer insight into management consulting and the meaning of such work in the context of con temporary, state- capitalist China. I also gained friendship.

Thanks must also go to my friends in Dalian who between them seemed to know every man ag er in the software park, and who gave me the vital contacts that opened up the field. They shared my passion for doing institu-tional fieldwork, and rallied around me when it seemed impossible. With-out them, the PhD proj ect on which this book is based would have turned out very differently.

I express my sincere gratitude to the institutions that have funded this research. My doctoral research was supported by a studentship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council. A research grant from the Institute of New Economic Thinking enabled me to revise the dissertation into a book.

At the London School of Economics (lse) my supervisors Stephan Feuchtwang and Laura Bear provided a wealth of intellectual stimulation

acknowl edgments

viii Acknowl edgments

and guidance during the PhD and thereafter. Stephan’s enduring enthu-siasm for this proj ect, and his faith in my capacities as an anthropologist, have helped me overcome the many challenges of fieldwork and writing. I thank Laura for always pushing me to draw out the contradictions of financialization and the connections between the everyday practices of ex-pertise I was observing and the production of global economic forms. Her comments have helped me make the most of my field data and realize the value of my contribution.

Since my PhD, I have benefited hugely from lively exchanges with many scholars working in the anthropology of finance and global capitalism and cognate disciplines of sociology, critical management studies, and ac-counting. I have been lucky to find an informal mentor in Kate Zaloom, who has provided invaluable support, not just through her constructive criticism but also with her advice on navigating the academic career path. I must also thank Janet Roitman, Martha Poon, Mike Power, David Stark, Jane Guyer, Marilyn Strathern, Lotta Björklund Larsen, Catherine Dolan, David Tuckett, and Rebecca Empson. A special mention goes to Horacio Ortiz; I only met him a couple of years ago, yet our discussions have sig-nificantly influenced my approach and the argumentation of this book. Through invited pre sen ta tions and workshops at New York University, the New School, the University of Sussex, the lse, the University of West-minster, the University of St.  Andrews, University College London, and L’École des Mines, I have received a wealth of comments, which have un-doubtedly had a great impact on the final manuscript— thanks to all who shared their thoughts. I have also benefited greatly from the four anony-mous reviewers of the book, whose comments have helped me strengthen my key arguments and refine the manuscript in so many ways.

Though not a formal writing group, the British Library Lady Sociolo-gists have provided the intellectual and emotional sustenance— typically over lunch— that have surely promoted productive writing stints in the reading rooms. I also wish to thank my peers at the lse, especially Miranda Sheild Johansson, Cathrine Thorleifsson, Aude Michelet, Luca Pes, Eliza-beth Frantz, and Katie Dow. I am grateful to Ruben Andersson for his close readings of early drafts; he taught me a lot about writing, especially for a broader audience.

I would also like to thank the staff at Duke University Press. My editor Ken Wissoker has believed in this proj ect right from the beginning, and

Acknowl edgments ix

made the journey through multiple rounds of peer review as smooth and productive as pos si ble. I have appreciated his critical yet sympathetic eye, and his constructive suggestions for improvement. I express gratitude also to Olivia Polk for pulling the manuscript together in preparation for pro-duction, and to Christine Riggio for her supreme efforts on the artwork program. Outside of Duke, credit must go to Anisha Peplinski for her fan-tastic job of adapting my fieldwork materials into publishable illustrations.

Fi nally, I thank my loved ones. Thank you to my brother, Laurence Chong, one of my loudest supporters, for his companionship, his jokes, and his optimism. I am enormously indebted to my mother, Lum Weng Bik, not least for the childcare that meant I could complete two rounds of manuscript revisions during maternity leave. Certainly, I have had mo-ments of doubt along the way, but her unwavering belief in my ability has helped see this book to completion. She taught me from an early age never to shy away from asking the big questions, the awkward questions, that we should question authority and how the world works. These lessons have stayed with me and animated my own investigation and critiques of global capitalism. I hope I can pass on these lessons to my son, Howie Chong- Daw, whose early appearance in the world delayed the completion of this book or gave me a little more time to work on the manuscript, depending how you see it. Fi nally, I express my deepest gratitude to my partner, Henry Daw, for always being there, for taking things away from me so I could focus, and for giving things to me so I could thrive. Crafted with the nour-ishment of his love, patience, and kindness, this book is dedicated to him.

IntroductIon

“some people are visionaries, others are operators. I’m a client guy.” So says John Scott, the chief executive of Systeo, a global management consul-tancy. The closest you could get to a corporate rock star, John travels the world with an entourage— his leadership team and a bevy of assistants— and has an army of loyal fans who track his movements online through his “Johnny on Tour” home page. These fans are none other than Systeo’s own employees. In the spring of 2009 he was due to make an eagerly anticipated visit to China. For weeks I had heard rumors about his inspirational talks, how they flowed with wisdom, insight, and humor, his power ful voice and magnetic charm redolent of evangelical preachers. Unsurprisingly, the event, styled as a “town hall meeting,” was packed. Con sul tants, ju nior and se nior, expatriate and Chinese, filled the ballroom of a five- star hotel in Beijing’s central business district, their attention fixed on their Svengali.

John believes the whole world is moving east. “China is the place to be!” he tells the audience. “When I first started out all I wanted to do was make a difference. If I was to start again I would start in China.” The audi-ence broke into applause. More than just cheap pop u lism and motivation- speak, John’s comments reflected the growing importance of the region for management consulting. He reassures the employees that Systeo will not be a casualty of the financial crisis that had, at the time, gripped the global economy. In fact, “it’s an opportunity for us to take market share from our competitors.” To do this, “we need to sell seven billion dollars’ worth of stuff every quarter . . . last quarter we did sell six billion worth of stuff, in the worst economic conditions.”

Stuff. A word so short, so casual, so innocuous, and arrestingly opaque. Headlines such as “nhs [National Health Ser vice] ‘has no idea what £300m of management consultancy buys’ ” draw attention to the colossal sums—of public money, no less— that are spent on con sul tants, while communicating

2 IntroductIon

a lingering doubt over their expertise.1 Social commentators depict man-agement consultancy as nothing more than a hollow per for mance of ex-pertise, or as one author put it, “a con.”2 The specter of deception is echoed in London’s West End where the critically acclaimed play Enron has thrust the darkest days of consulting, quite literally, into the limelight, almost ten years after the American corporate giant of the same name collapsed. In short, we find that consulting is reduced to little more than an expensive package of corporate hype and moral deviance in popu lar narratives. But this explanation tells us little about the role that management consulting plays in the con temporary global economy. The likes of at&t, Ford Motor Com pany, nasa, and the bbc, huge cap i tal ist firms as well as well- known nonprofits, have all at some point hired management con sul tants, but for what exactly?3 What do management consultancies do? And how do they do it?

John’s failure to define consulting— “stuff ”— was not a one- off. “Does your mother understand Systeo?” This is the question posed to newly hired con sul tants, bold type on an other wise blank screen, the first frame of a short film played in their induction session. The human resources man ag er stops the film, turns to the puzzled faces, and says, “Work at Systeo involves many abstract concepts so it’s difficult to explain [it] to other people.” The film resumes, showing a series of con sul tants drawn from offices around the world struggling to describe their everyday work to their nearest and dearest. The last con sul tant is none other than John Scott. He can’t answer the question either. Deciphering the object of consulting— “what manage-ment consultancies do”—is not just a matter for external inquiry. It is also presented within the consultancy as a dilemma that employees must learn to circumnavigate. By showing one Systeo employee after another fudge through such a seemingly straightforward question, the film prepares new staff for what will be a recurrent experience— alienation from their family and friends. Even chief executive John Scott is unable to explain to his mother, and by implication anyone else, what Systeo does, underscoring the point that this is not a dilemma that fades with experience. Rather, “enlightenment” is achieved through a repositioning of the analytical lens.

John looks straight at the camera, pausing with a smile, before inviting fresh- faced con sul tants to “think about the nature of what we do— that is, in fact, what we do.”

IntroductIon 3

I gained access to a global management consultancy in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China, a place that many people will have never heard of, let alone consider to be an appropriate place to study consulting. Chi-cago, the birthplace of the consultancy and home to the headquarters of many of the world’s most famous consultancies, would be a more obvi-ous starting point.4 I went to Dalian because it is China’s it- outsourcing capital, where one can find many of the big names in software develop-ment, as well as technology and business consulting. My original plan was to conduct research inside the offshore platforms that had proliferated in recent years. I was interested in the forms of rationality that can be found in, and that inform the operations of, these high- tech workplaces.5 Many impressive ethnographic accounts of China’s manufacturing sector already existed, but similar research into China’s knowledge economy was thin on the ground. As a doctoral student in anthropology at the London School of Economics I hoped to provide a timely description of how Chinese high- tech workers were adapting to the new social and cultural pressures that came with China’s transition to a market- oriented economy. I was particu-larly fascinated by scholarly observations suggesting that knowledge- based industries in China were plagued by a prob lem of insufficient corporate professionalism, and that Chinese employees lacked the social norms and dispositions of global work.6

For six months I networked relentlessly, with the hope of eventually securing institutional access to conduct long- term, embedded fieldwork. I spent my days interviewing professionals who worked in Dalian’s software parks, and my nights socializing at clubs and bars frequented by the expa-triate overseers of global companies. Expatriates’ penchant for hard liquor meant that I learned to hold my drink while sounding out fieldwork op-portunities. I also learned to cast the fieldwork net widely. Karaoke parties, trips to the fish market, meetings at Starbucks, all featured in my diary. I would go to an event if I even vaguely suspected that I would meet people who worked in technology or outsourcing, each time hoping for that one serendipitous introduction that would open doors. Eventually my efforts started to pay off. Four months after I arrived I had meetings lined up with several software vendors and technology companies. However, each nego-tiation for entry resulted in more or less the same set of outcomes. My pitches would be favorably received by man ag ers in Dalian, but weeks later,

4 IntroductIon

when I had already convinced myself that access was in the bag, I would be refused by an authority situated higher up the chain of command, in Beijing, Shanghai, or headquarters located abroad. The most commonly stated reason for rejection was “client confidentiality,” though I suspected that security- paranoid technology firms were also concerned about poten-tial corporate espionage. One by one I crossed off the names of high- tech companies, some world famous, others less familiar, that had operations in Dalian.

In January 2008 I found myself facing the prospect of jettisoning institu-tionally based fieldwork. I had approached no fewer than six companies— all of them had rejected my request for access. Every thing rested on the final pitch I had lined up. It was to a global management consultancy, Systeo.7 At the time Systeo was my least preferred option, mainly because it was not, strictly speaking, a high- tech com pany. I worried that I would not be able to fulfill my primary research aim of examining how local rationalities— whether of late socialism or Confucianism— interacted with the rationali-ties of global high- tech work. I wanted to research an organ ization that was explic itly involved in the production and propagation of information technology. Management con sul tants, in my eyes, were all smoke and mir-rors, fancy Power Points and corporate speak. I was not entirely wrong. But what I did not realize then was how management con sul tants were deeply implicated in the spread of information technology systems and the it- enabled outsourcing of ser vices. Accessing Systeo would not compromise my research agenda. It would broaden it.

I had been introduced to Systeo by an En glish teacher from the United Kingdom. We met at a Gaelic football tournament, of all places. He was one of several expatriate language trainers and “cross- cultural experts” living in Dalian, who were hired to iron out the wrinkles in professional-ism that apparently beset global companies. These prob lems were typically narrated as emanating from culture— the disruption posed to corporate culture by local norms and values, and cross- cultural misunderstanding between “East” and “West.” This En glish teacher correctly anticipated that the prospect of free En glish instruction, not to mention the cultural ex-pertise of an anthropologist who could lend a “fresh pair of eyes” to their internal management pro cesses, would be highly attractive in this context. After my successive rejections, I was overjoyed and a little shocked to be granted approval to carry out twelve months of fieldwork, a period that

IntroductIon 5

would eventually be extended. It was agreed that in exchange for access I would edit communications and other internal documents, as well as give En glish classes. I would be based inside the com pany’s “shared ser vice cen-ter,” where their back- office operations took place.

However, this was not their only offshore platform in Dalian. Systeo also ran centers dedicated to “business pro cess outsourcing” and “it ap-plication outsourcing” in the city. I was intrigued by the diff er ent kinds of outsourcing— perhaps these would engender diff er ent rationalities of op-eration? I hoped to carry out fieldwork in these sites as well. But that old chestnut, “client confidentiality,” reared its ugly head again. Unlike the shared ser vice center, these other centers were not directed to internal operations but to external business; thus, I would need permission from Systeo’s cli-ents to enter these spaces, almost certainly an impossible ask. Although I was initially disappointed, this led to an impor tant realization that would animate the rest of my fieldwork: outsourcing was not merely a way of trimming internal costs; outsourcing was also a ser vice to be sold.

In the last twenty years, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of organ izations that have hollowed out their key business functions. Every-thing but frontline ser vices is carried out in low- wage ser vice centers in the global South. While the revolution in information and communica-tion technologies (icts) facilitates such orga nizational change, it is man-agement con sul tants who actively promote such structures. The offshore platforms I had come to study could not be separated from the practices of consulting. it- enabled outsourcing was one of the ways in which con-sul tants sought to improve orga nizational per for mance. Management con sul tants are more than Power Point wizards; I had obtained access to actors who have very profound effects on orga nizational structures and working practices, actors with the power to redirect flows of labor and capital, and thus shape economic forms. It did not make sense for my study to focus solely on outsourcing. My study needed to look at the vari ous ways, of which outsourcing is just one, that con sul tants claim to create value. What are the orga nizational forms and managerial practices that con sul tants propagate? What is the role of technology? What are the dis-courses of worth and productivity through which con sul tants legitimize their interventions? To answer these questions I needed to get out of the shared ser vice center and into the front office, where I could observe and interview con sul tants.

6 IntroductIon

This book is an ethnographic account of management consulting, based on sixteen months of fieldwork inside the China arm of Systeo, a leading global management consultancy that specializes in the implementation of it management systems and outsourcing ser vices. It draws on participant observation and interview- based data with con sul tants and back- office workers, as well as my own reflexive insights from being a liminal member of the consultancy. I describe my pathway from En glish trainer to Systeo contractor, and how this transformation, from adjunct to employee, con-ferred multiple vantage points from which I observed and analyzed my object of ethnographic inquiry: the expertise of con sul tants. As well as accessing some of Systeo’s front offices in China, I was also permitted to follow con-sulting teams to “client sites,” their clients’ organ izations, where con sul tants spend most of their time.

The overarching aim of the book is deceptively simple: to answer the questions of what con sul tants do and how they do it. One con sul tant I met during fieldwork described consulting as taking the “best practices of clients, using them internally to find out what works, and then selling these onto our [other] clients.” I was stunned to hear this. It was not just what she said, but also the candid manner in which she described consultancy as the pro cess of recycling knowledge, originally obtained from their clients, for profit.8 This comment would suggest that con sul tants, who are hired by most large organ izations at one time or another, are creating institu-tional convergence. Scholarly accounts have similarly observed that con-sul tants, far from creating managerial innovations, are in the business of standardizing orga nizational practice (Wright, Sturdy, and Wylie 2012). Best practice, it would seem, is both a trope for elevating con sul tants’ expertise and a narrative that legitimizes the creation of cookie- cutter organ izations. Which leads us to the question: Is Systeo, a global management consul-tancy, seeking to make Chinese business practices conform to standards already established in Eu rope and North Amer i ca? Throughout my field-work I found a recurrent tension between the aims of a global management consultancy, to standardize orga nizational practice, and the practicalities of consulting in China. This was a tension that played out internally as well as in relation to their Chinese clients. Many expatriates posted to China shared a perception that Systeo’s China arm— specifically its mainland Chinese employees— failed to conform to the com pany’s global norms, standards, and pro cesses. This failure to implement best practice within

IntroductIon 7

the consultancy seemed to threaten the very epistemological basis on which con sul tants claimed to possess expertise. If they could not ensure that best practice prevailed within Systeo, how could they sell it externally? This epis-temic rupture would provide the fertile ground upon which I could inves-tigate what con sul tants do.

Focusing on the knowledge practices of consulting, this book seeks to show how con sul tants produce and legitimize their expertise. Inspired by an anthropological approach that stresses how global capitalism is always produced through local actions, discourses, and meanings,9 I show how Chinese employees employed at this global management consultancy draw on local tropes of modernity to understand and explain their apparently global expertise. Best practice might nominally refer to the standardiza-tion of business praxis, but it is narrated, sold, and legitimated by recourse to locally relevant and historically specific discourses. This is not to say that consulting in China is a diluted version or an exceptional instantiation of consulting proper. Rather, it is precisely because con sul tants’ expertise is so slippery and difficult to describe that there is a need to find systems of meaning that resonate with their clients, which in China include many large state- owned enterprises (soes). In contrast to depictions of manage-ment consultancy as technocratic practice, I argue that management con-sultancy is the business of creating ethical injunctions. It is the work of moralizing and legitimating what is “best” under the aegis of financializa-tion, and thus engenders the production of ethical remits, proj ects, and anchors that inform social action.

One of the ways this is achieved is through practices that bring new social realities into being. Commonly held notions of expertise, which sug-gest that experts must have demonstrable skill and a specialized body of knowledge, cannot adequately explain the work of con sul tants and their remarkable ability to sell their “wares.” Instead, we find that the expertise of management con sul tants is performative.

According to geographer Nigel Thrift, managerial knowledge, which at its most basic level is concerned with the minutiae of interaction and human be hav ior, is performative in the sense that embodied per for mances of this knowledge are required for its authentication (Thrift 2005, 96). In addition, he suggests that the prescriptive character of reflexive manage-rial knowledge is such that it “has the power to make its theories and de-scriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and

8 IntroductIon

new bodies” (Thrift 2005, 11). This second notion of performativity bears close resemblance to sociologist Michel Callon’s thesis of performation. Writing specifically about economic models, Callon argues that economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (Callon 1998b, 2). This thesis has been taken up with gusto in social studies of finance, where scholars have demonstrated how financial equations and trading algorithms work not to represent but to intervene in the social real ity of financial markets.10 Management con sul tants also pro-duce models— those that are actually used in business— practical models that do not necessarily correspond to economic or management theory as taught in universities.11 In so doing, they play an impor tant role in shaping everyday business realities. For these models don’t just reflect par tic u lar ways of thinking; they also create ways of thinking. Often depicted as the ultimate knowledge workers, con sul tants produce forms of knowledge— business concepts, ideas, and theories. These are epistemological tools of modeling social real ity, which create the legitimacy for orga nizational change. How these models acquire traction— the techniques of abstraction, calcu-lation, and persuasion that are utilized, the forms of social discourse and value registers they engage— features centrally in the analy sis.

By analyzing how knowledge is created, and how epistemological in-terventions are staged, this book shows how management con sul tants are connected to the practices of valuation and new logics of worth that have accompanied the financialization of corporations and everyday life. It is argued that management consulting is concerned with the creation of cultures of commensuration, through which new economic impera-tives, forms of value, and power relations are legitimated and naturalized. This book, which provides the first portrait of management consulting in China, also shows how management con sul tants are implicated in pro-cesses of social and economic transformation in con temporary China. I suggest that Systeo is in the business of performing financial capitalism. Unlike in the United States and Eu rope, in China management consul-tancy is still in its infancy, with major firms opening offices only in the last twenty years. In this period China has shifted away from a system of socialist planning to become a flourishing, market- oriented economy with growing global stature. Management con sul tants have played a key role, installing the technologies and imparting the managerial techniques that have seen Chinese state firms transformed into financial entities.

IntroductIon 9

Management consultancy and china’s Proj ect of Modernization

Since China’s turn toward a market economy, modernization has been the stated goal of the Chinese government, whose legitimacy is intimately con-nected to the rising prosperity of what is now the world’s second largest economy. Initiated by Deng Xiao Ping’s program of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang)— institutional reform and the opening of China’s economy to foreign investment— which began in 1978, China’s transition from a so-cialist command economy to one based on market princi ples has involved wide- scale restructuring. At first the changes were muted, focused not so much on creating a market economy but rather on the efficient function-ing of the planned economy. However, economic volatility together with growing po liti cal instability pushed the Chinese government to opt for a rather diff er ent tack from the mid-1990s. After Deng Xiao Ping’s tour of foreign- invested enterprises in the special economic zones located in the southern provinces in 1992, there was a shift toward explicit market re-forms and radical restructuring, which involved active participation in the global economy as a means of stimulating growth and increasing employ-ment. Not just in terms of opening its doors to multinationals, which have rushed to relocate vast swaths of their global production chains to China, but also by outsourcing the job of domestic industrial restructuring to for-eign institutions.

Po liti cal scientist Edward Steinfeld argues that China is pursuing its goal of modernization not by developing its own unique institutional frame-work, but by adhering to the rules set by the advanced industrial West. His argument rests on conceptualizing globalization as the organ ization of pro-duction hierarchies across national borders, that is, networked production. This definition sits in contrast with the popu lar view that globalization is more or less approximate to the dramatic expansion of trade and competi-tion that has served to decimate old hierarchies between developed and developing nations and to produce a so- called flat world (Friedman 2005). For Steinfeld, the staggering growth experienced since the mid-1990s is a direct result of the decision to integrate China’s economy into an already established global system of networked production, enabled by the align-ment of norms and practices that come with “institutional outsourcing”— “the ceding to a third party . . . the power to define key societal institu-tions” (Steinfeld 2010, 25).

10 IntroductIon

His account is a timely alternative to the usual explanations of China’s spectacular economic growth, which take as their point of departure the supposed anachronism of a strong state and liberalized markets.12 Vari-ous authors have sought to exceptionalize the instantiation of capitalism in post- Mao China, principally on the basis of culture and the specific context of local practices or late development. In contrast, Steinfeld reminds us of the influential role of Western cap i tal ist institutions in shaping China’s eco-nomic infrastructure and transition to a cap i tal ist economy.13 He goes so far as to say that China, in some spheres, “directly tied itself to foreign rules and rule- making authorities” (Steinfeld 2010, 44), giving the examples of China’s accession to the World Trade Organ ization (which took place in 2001) and the listing of soes on overseas stock exchanges. The latter is of par tic u lar relevance. In 1994, the Com pany Law was passed, providing a framework for converting soes into the legal form of the corporation (Naughton 2006, 201). Then, under the policy of “grasping the large and releasing the small” (zhua da fang xiao), which was adopted in 1997, China’s largest soes were corporatized in a wave of initial public offerings that con-tinues today, requiring a radical overhaul of managerial practices. Accord-ing to Steinfeld, this was accomplished by hiring overseas- trained Chinese man ag ers as a means of importing the requisite expertise in financial management needed to run a publicly listed global enterprise (2010, 34). He does not mention the deployment of foreign management consultan-cies, an omission that is particularly con spic u ous given his stated emphasis on institutional outsourcing. Although consultancies disclose their asso-ciations with Chinese soes,14 they have so far escaped the attention of the many scholars who write about China’s economic development.15

If we look at the recent history of Systeo’s business, and specifically where its business is expanding, it is apparent that the marketization of China’s economy and accompanying economic restructuring has created a new market for consultancy. Systeo is looking to move more and more of its head count to China in order to keep up with the increasing demand for consulting ser vices. This demand comes not only from Chinese soes and private Chinese companies, but also from the multitude of multinational companies that have set up production in the “workshop of the world” following China’s opening up. They too are companies of significant scale and wealth, making them ideal customers for technology- based consult-ing, which is known to be lengthy in duration and thus expensive in cost.

IntroductIon 11

Systeo’s clients include the corporatized soes in the strategic industries of energy, banking, and communications, known collectively as the coun-try’s “National Champions.” These are also some of the world’s largest corporations, rivaling the likes of Walmart and Apple in terms of market capitalization.16 However, the extent to which corporatized Chinese soes op-erate as public companies in ser vice to their shareholders is still in question. In another research proj ect, I found that fund man ag ers from the United States and Eu rope who invest in China frequently articulated concerns about Chinese soes in par tic u lar (and Chinese public companies more gener-ally).17 As one fund man ag er put it, he was concerned that these entities were “employment agencies of the [Chinese] state,” that is, that these were still, in some ways, socialist rather than cap i tal ist institutions. Elsewhere, com-mentators have articulated a related fear that these behemoths operate with a distinctly “Chinese” management ethos, which circumvents the established norms and practices of global capitalism.18 In summary, there is still consid-erable anxiety outside China that Chinese companies are operating accord-ing to their own historically and culturally informed ethics. Perceptions that Chinese companies are not fully disposed to Western financial capitalism, and thus not in the ser vice of shareholders, can make these entities very unpredictable and risky in the eyes of long- term investors.

Systeo plays a vital role in making these entities into viable investment targets. It has been argued that “[public] companies can use consultancies as part of their communication strategy towards investment analysts,” to convince them that “management is committed to improving shareholder value.”19 By shaping the objectives, the pro cesses, and the operations of Chinese soes, Systeo helps to create a narrative that these entities are pro-fessionalized, modernized entities with “good management.” That is to say, having an American management consultancy rather than, say, a Chinese consultancy (the latter being considerably cheaper), refashion these organ-izations and disseminate managerial expertise can be read as an attempt to dismantle culturalist accounts of Chinese capitalism and thus aid the external perception that Chinese soes are investable.20 The argument that Systeo is shaping a cultural as well as a material proj ect of transformation is buttressed by the fact that its business of consultancy is premised on global convergence and standardization. For Systeo, consulting is the job of making corporate China converge with an already established institu-tional framework and cultural form of global capitalism.

12 IntroductIon

The very fact that Chinese soes have hired Systeo, a global manage-ment consultancy with headquarters in the United States, to overhaul their management practices is indicative of the kind of capitalism that is being instantiated in China. However, it should also be noted that in other as-pects corporatization in China is not practiced as it is in North Amer-i ca or the United Kingdom. Le- Yin Zhang (2004) has pointed out that in China only a third of all shares are classified as tradable for a publicly listed com pany. For soes, the remaining two- thirds are owned by the Chi-nese state, making it the majority shareholder. According to Zhang, this has severely limited the potential disciplinary effects of public listing, and goes some way to explain the failure to yield improved efficiency (Zhang 2004). Elsewhere, Richard McGregor, former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, has argued that the role of the Chinese Communist Party has been underestimated, and that it “deliberately downplayed its role in [corporatized soes’] operations” (2010, 47) and that beneath the veneer of market- oriented regulation the Chinese Politburo still retains control (2010, 46). However, McGregor’s observations also seem to indicate that the rigors of stock market discipline are being imposed. He notes that one of China’s largest soes— PetroChina— restructured its organ ization for the main purpose of increasing share prices. In China, as in North Amer i ca, large numbers of workers are being laid off.21 He says: “In the pro cess of repackaging itself to sell a portion of its shares to foreign investors, the [PetroChina] group shed one million staff and the ministry dis appeared altogether, leaving the com pany with little direct oversight from the gov-ernment” (McGregor 2010, 61). Despite the importance of economic sta-bility for the ccp to maintain its po liti cal legitimacy, it has not maintained paternalist employment structures— the cradle- to- grave welfare system known as the “iron rice bowl” that existed prior to market reforms. The iron rice bowl was gradually dismantled in the post- Mao reform period, marginally in the 1980s and more comprehensively in the second phase of reforms, reaching nationwide implementation through the Labor Law of 1994 (Lee 2007).22 In China, the shift to privatization and corporatization has led to the kind of restructuring and changes in employment practices that have characterized the shift from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism in the Anglo- American world.

IntroductIon 13

Mediating Managerial thought

Systeo promotes a range of orga nizational and managerial practices, many of which could be described as fads or fashions— knowledge products with a limited shelf life and questionable efficacy. Indeed, such a charge— that they trade in baseless management ideas— has been levied at manage-ment con sul tants writ large (Fincham and Evans 1999). It is impor tant to note, however, that the practices and techniques con sul tants propagate also bear the traces of much older, more developed areas of management thought. This is, in part, because modern management— the kind that is applied to complex organ izations— has evolved hand- in- hand with the ex-pansion of the consulting industry (Kipping 2002). Many eminent man-agement thinkers practiced as con sul tants. For them, consulting work was not an adjunct to theorizing, but often the means through which theory developed. In this re spect, management differs considerably from more “pure” academic disciplines; far from being sullied by practical application, management theories are produced through, and in tandem with, practical application.

There is a common perception that management consulting began with, and consists of, advising top- level management on strategy and organ-ization, a myth that was purportedly spread by James O. McKinsey and James Bowker to benefit their own consulting firm, McKinsey and Co. (Wright and Kipping 2012). In fact, the roots of management consulting lie in industrial engineering. It emerged with the development of scien-tific management at the end of the nineteenth century. Typically associated with the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, scientific manage-ment evolved through practical concerns about how best to improve the efficiency of the shop floor. Taylor eschewed formal higher education for an apprenticeship with Midvale Steel Com pany, where he became deeply concerned with the prob lem of “soldiering”— workers who, fearing that in-creased output might lead to layoffs, would deliberately limit output. Part of the prob lem, according to Taylor, was that management did not know what constituted a “fair day’s work,” and thus could not judge whether or not workers’ productivity was reasonable given the demands of their tasks. The solution would come through “scientific” princi ples, applied not only to the development of work but also to the se lection of personnel. Key fea-tures of his method were the subdivision of the production pro cess, rou-

14 IntroductIon

tinization and standardization of tasks, the use of systematic observation and mea sure ment to calculate optimal production speeds, and target setting. Taylor also favored a clear separation between the planning and execution of tasks. Mental work was the domain of man ag ers; workers meanwhile suffered increasing alienation and disengagement from the very activities they were responsible for carry ing out.

Taylor’s techniques were pop u lar ized and disseminated through his publications, including the best- selling book The Princi ples of Scientific Management, and also by consulting to industrial companies and offering to remodel their production pro cesses according to his system. Indeed, Taylor has been described as the “grand father” of management consult-ing,23 though leading firms of this initial period of management consulting were founded by other figures in the scientific management stable. Usu-ally trained as industrial engineers, these figures set up and rapidly ex-panded consultancies that promoted similar yet competing approaches to Taylorism. They were all, nonetheless, focused on improving the efficiency of the labor pro cess. Hence the labeling of these con sul tants as “efficiency experts.”

Scientific management dominated managerial thought until the 1930s, when, in the midst of welfare capitalism, the alienating and dehumanizing aspects of technical rationalization came under scrutiny (Wren and Be -deian 2009). It was superseded by humanistic and behavioristic approaches that focused on worker motivation and satisfaction.24 Most well known is the human relations (hr) school, which emphasized the importance of normative forms of control: “the idea that man ag ers could more effectively regulate workers by attending not only to their be hav ior but to their thoughts and emotions” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 364).

The roots of human relations can be traced to the infamous “Hawthorne studies,” which took place at the Hawthorne works of the Western Elec-tric Com pany. Beginning in 1924, multiple experiments were conducted over the course of eight years to analyze diff er ent aspects of employee be-hav ior, leading to a mass of data that personnel management strug gled to interpret. One social scientist who was brought in to make sense of the findings was Harvard University professor Elton Mayo, who would later be known as the “ father” of human relations. With interests in psychoanaly-sis and industrial psy chol ogy, Mayo emphasized the importance of work-ers’ mental health and emotional states, and demonstrated that “once the

IntroductIon 15

irrationalities of workers are removed, or ameliorated, they will respond positively to non- economic incentives and be motivated to increase their productivity” (Trahair and Bruce 2012, 58). Proponents of human relations have helped to draw attention to the social and nonmonetary determinants of motivation, the importance of informal work groups and effective su-pervision on employee satisfaction and per for mance.25 They can also be credited for developing conceptual frameworks— for example, the idea that organ izations are social systems, which has influenced con temporary fields of orga nizational be hav ior and human resource management (see chapter 1). And their “softer” approach to management arguably paved the way for concepts of orga nizational culture that came to the fore much later on, in the 1980s (see chapter 7).

The rise of human relations could be discerned in the shifting compo-sition of the management consultancy industry. From the 1950s, the ef-ficiency experts were no longer dominant. They had been overtaken by a second wave of consulting firms that specialized in corporate organ ization and strategy (for example, McKinsey and Co.), selling expertise in “orga-nizational development, work redesign and personnel management” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 375). As well as drawing on many of their ideas, these con-sultancies also deployed methods devised by the human relations school such as employee interviewing and counseling techniques (John Smith cited in Trahair and Bruce 2012).

The 1960s signaled the beginning of the modern era of management, in which we see a diversification of approaches. Although humanistic man-agement was still practiced, man ag ers had begun to question the efficacy of costly human relations practices, and thus looked again at more scientific, technical mea sures. Operations research (or) and management science became increasingly impor tant, and there was a return in management theory to quantitative techniques, rational calculation, and Tayloresque “princi ples.” In par tic u lar, there was an emphasis on pro cess, revealing a new incarnation of managerial discourse: “Pro cess theorists equated man-agement with setting objectives and designing systems for meeting those objectives. Planning, forecasting and controlling were meant to be the man ag er’s watchwords. Pro cess theories thereby provided management with a definition of itself consistent with the tools of or and manage-ment science” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 377).26 Especially influential has been the thesis of “management by objectives,” pop u lar ized by management

16 IntroductIon

guru Peter Drucker, who argued that the “man ag er should be directed and controlled by the objectives of per for mance rather than by his boss” (Drucker 1954, 137). This thesis has come to inform con temporary per-for mance management, whereby employees are encouraged, via objective setting, to exert self- control rather than being subject to constant external supervision.27

The current wave of management consultancies, including Systeo, have found success in promoting process- based management. As we will see, they not only advocate management by objectives; they also install com-puter systems that can operationalize pro cesses. Further, many of the larg-est consultancies have diversified, profitably, into outsourcing ser vices such as “business pro cess outsourcing,” which reflects an under lying assump-tion that an organ ization consists of a set of pro cesses, some of which can be shifted elsewhere. It is by reworking pro cesses that consultancies make claims to produce “high- performance” organ izations. In doing so they have also helped to instill a new regime of value, one that privileges global finance.

Financialization and the rise of Management consultancy

Since the 1980s, the management consulting industry has grown rapidly— faster than Western national economies— although its overall revenues remain small in comparison to other industries. In 1992 the global mar-ket for management consulting had an estimated value of $28.3 billion. By 2010 it had grown by more than tenfold, and was estimated to be worth $350 billion (Kipping and Clark 2012, 4). In part this staggering expan-sion is a reflection of the increasing dominance of the ser vice sector and knowledge- based industries (Kipping 2002). Another explanation lies in the structural changes to the global economy that have taken place over the last few de cades. The explosion of management consulting has coin-cided with the rise of financialization, that is, the shift from industrial to financial capitalism.

In recent years, authors from a range of academic disciplines have be-come interested in “how an increasingly autonomous realm of global fi-nance has altered the under lying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of demo cratic society” (Van der Zwan 2014, 99–100). They have used the term financialization to describe a variety of phenomena.

IntroductIon 17

For some, financialization denotes a new regime of accumulation char-acterized by “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (Epstein 2005, 3), such that we are now ob-serving “globalized production for the flow of funds” (Milberg 2008, 421). In this new regime we find that “non- financial firms have increasingly used finance rather than production as both a source and use of their funds” (Milberg 2008, 422). For others financialization refers to the ascendancy of shareholder value ideology as the cornerstone of corporate governance.28 While the corporation was previously considered to be a social institution with obligations to a range of stakeholders, including workers and local communities, today the primary objective is to create value for sharehold-ers in the form of rising share prices. Other stakeholders and their de-mands are subordinated to this goal.

The pursuit of shareholder value has led to the adoption of new business models. While in the past companies looked to “retain [staff] and reinvest,” today they look for ways to “downsize and distribute.”29 They focus on their “core competences,” outsourcing other parts of their business in pursuit of short- term gains in financial value rather than long- term growth.30 Mass layoffs and increased job insecurity have ensued. However, the elimination of productive capacity and the reduction in jobs has not, in the main, in-creased profits from production. Instead, profitability increasingly derives from financial rents, with the corporation becoming reconfigured to ac-commodate new strategies of capitalization.31 Man ag ers have come to view the firm as a financial asset, something from which value can be extracted rather than created,32 reducible to its balance sheet, which is engineered to please securities analysts and institutional investors.

As agents of orga nizational change, management con sul tants have successfully mined this new orthodoxy of corporate governance for their own interests. Since the 1990s they have actively promoted “value- based management”— management with the express objective of increasing re-turns for shareholders. Scholars of social accounting have analyzed the steps taken to transform shareholder value ideology into a consulting product. First, a metric of shareholder value— such as “tsr” (total shareholder re-turn), “eva” (economic value added), and “roi” (return on investment)—is selected or devised to mea sure per for mance. Second, a package of imple-mentation mea sures is developed— the managerial practices and technologies

18 IntroductIon

designed to remodel the organ ization to incentivize the creation of share-holder value (for example, putting employees, especially se nior manage-ment, on a shareholder value creation bonus plan). This second aspect is critical, for “if the product were a metric it would be cheap; as long as the product is implementation it must be expensive because implemen-tation requires continuous assistance over a period of time” (Froud et al. 2000, 84). Third, management con sul tants develop the “guides to action and the promises that purposive management action will be rewarded” (Froud et al. 2000, 81)— that is, they develop narratives and other devices that explic itly link the creation of shareholder value to success in capital markets. Through these three ele ments, shareholder value is transformed from a fragmented rhe toric into an ontological entity and a moral justifica-tion for intervention.

The importance of developing a “package of implementation” becomes evident when we look at the shifting makeup of the management consult-ing industry. Since financial capitalism began to take hold, strategy firms that had hitherto dominated the industry found their market position being challenged by it- related consultancies and the consulting arms of large accountancy firms. Including the likes of Pricewater houseCoopers and the other “Big Four” firms, as well as ibm and Hewlett- Packard, these challengers have experienced tremendous growth since the early 1990s, and now make up the largest consultancies worldwide in head count and profits. Their ascent can be traced to the promotion and implementation of computer software known as enterprise systems, especially “enterprise resource planning” (erp) systems, which assume the organ ization is a conglomeration of pro cesses, so reflecting the turn to process- based man-agement.33 Moreover, through their capacity to mea sure and monitor pro-cesses in accordance with overarching objectives, erp systems are able to “operationalize value- based management.”

These technologies, which have their roots in military decision- making systems, have served to elevate managerial control on a huge scale.34 erp systems are a type of automated accounting system (Chapman 2005), which replicates “the central ner vous system” of an organ ization (Yen, Chou, and Chang 2001). More specifically, they have been described as “computer- based technologies that integrate data across an organ ization and impose standardized procedures on the data’s input, use and dissemi-nation” (Grant et al. 2006, 2) with the stated goal of reducing costs and

IntroductIon 19

thus improving profits. Consulting ser vices typically focus on the orga-nizational changes required to accommodate erp systems— which are de-signed by software companies (erp vendors), not consultancies— and on training their users. In comparison to the proj ects carried out by strategy con sul tants, an erp implementation is extremely labor- intensive— which goes some way to explain why it- related consultancies hire much larger numbers of con sul tants.35 erp implementation is also very lucrative, often taking years to complete and costing on average $15 million.36 Despite their hefty price tag, these systems have become ubiquitous, a requisite manage-rial device of the modern corporation. Today almost every large organ-ization in the United States and Eu rope operates an erp system (Pollock and Williams 2008); emerging economies are the next big targets. Indeed, implementing erp is the bread and butter of Systeo’s work in China.

A recent study notes that “erp systems are designed around ‘information blueprints’ that supposedly represent the end- user organ ization(s). These templates can, in princi ple, be designed specifically for that organ ization and then mapped onto the pro cesses and terminology used by the vendor. However, this is difficult, risky and expensive, so in practice most such ‘blueprints’ are based on business models claimed to represent ‘industry best practice’ for each par tic u lar pro cess designed into the system” (Knox et al. 2007, 26). That is to say, erp systems tend to impose a one- size- fits- all model of restructuring. Best practice does not, however, only refer to standardization. In their lit er a ture erp vendors and management consul-tancies typically define “best practice” as the practice that confers maximal profit, and that often comes at the expense of labor.37

In his book The New Ruthless Economy Simon Head documents the critical role that erp systems have played in the rise of “reengineering,” a managerial technique that first became popu lar in the 1970s (Hammer and Champy 1993) and that harnesses the computer to replicate and enact forms of surveillance and control in the domain of office work in a man-ner that bears striking resemblance to Taylorist forms of management that originated with industrial manufacturing. erp systems enable workers to be monitored in minute detail— where, when, and how long you spend on any one task can now be documented in real time. Head argues that “the word ‘reengineering’ ” has “become synonymous for the practice of scientific management in the con temporary ser vice economy” (Head 2003, 68), and that erp systems, far from signaling a reinvention of management, extend

20 IntroductIon

the dehumanizing practices commonly associated with Fordist accumula-tion (see also Braverman 1974) to the “new economy,” by making them amenable for deployment in the increasingly dominant ser vice sector. By connecting erp systems with scientific management, Head highlights the importance of technical devices for efficiency, a management practice that dates back to the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his stopwatch, and Henry Gantt and his “man rec ord chart.”38 What distinguishes erp systems, though, is the semiotic framework in which this technology is installed and implicated in producing. erp systems are a means of enact-ing efficiency. Hence, whether or not organ izations actually become more efficient as a result of erp implementation may not be critical. Appearing more efficient may be justification enough for an erp implementation.

The task of molding Chinese soes into global corporations reveals the inscription of erp systems as a repre sen ta tion of modernity and vector of value. The mass of ipos that were initiated by the turn to corporatization in the 1990s also led to a modernization drive in the organ izations that would be floated, often prior to flotation (Reimers 2003). To obtain the highest pos si ble valuation, Chinese soes undertook the considerable investment of installing erp systems to signal to investors that they had the managerial equipment identified with a modern corporation (Reimers 2003).39 This was particularly impor tant for organ izations that were stalwarts of the former planned economy, and thus considered the antithesis of modern cap i tal ist practice. The narrative that is frequently mobilized within Systeo suggests that China’s comparatively recent opening and switch to a market- oriented economy leaves it lacking in the professional conduct and busi-ness acumen required to compete in the global knowledge economy, hence the need for consulting ser vices and erp systems. Although the content of this narrative features the specificities of the China context, the struc-ture of the narrative— the appeal to a constructed deficiency in market- oriented prowess—is not exclusive to China. That is to say, the practice of installing erp systems to create the “right” repre sen ta tion of capitalism is not unique to marketizing China; the proliferation of erp systems around the world is inextricably linked to a more general shift toward, and the standardization of techniques used to produce, the vital “input” of share-holder value— financial accountability.

IntroductIon 21

reflexive Management, collaboration, and Access

One of the first questions people ask when I tell them I carried out field-work inside a global management consultancy is: “How did you get ac-cess?” Many assume that con sul tants would be paranoid about having an anthropologist embedded among their ranks, not least because what I am interested in— the forms of knowledge and practices of valuation that un-derpin con temporary managerial techniques—is also what con sul tants sell. Certainly, I did encounter difficulties in gaining entry to Systeo and then within the organ ization, difficulties that proved insightful for my research. Re sis tance was typically justified by recourse to an implication that Systeo’s business was based upon unique and proprietary knowledge. In short, there was a perception that Systeo’s knowledge- based business would be threatened by permitting the entry of a party who is not an employee, and therefore not contractually obliged to maintain nondisclosure. How-ever, once inside I found that man ag ers never went as far as claiming that Systeo owned proprietary technologies or knowledge. Instead, they talked about the “extremely power ful tools” with which they claimed to be able to gain control over the inherent uncertainty of con temporary capitalism. Con sul tants were insecure about having an outsider observe their inner workings not because they produce proprietary knowledge, but because they are knowledge experts who do not produce proprietary knowledge.

Management consultancies are the central institution in what geographer Nigel Thrift terms the “cultural cir cuit of capital . . . [which is] responsible for the production and distribution of managerial knowledge” (Thrift 2005, 61).40 Con sul tants trade in reflexive business management— they sell knowledge of the “practicalities of business,” which is, in turn, fed back into business practices. In other words, con sul tants are engaged in the commodification and circulation of everyday business practices. However, the fact that con sul tants give the impression that outsider access might prompt security concerns over intellectual property suggests that these ac-tors may feel insecure about their expertise. In such a context, one might expect that I would need to downplay my interest in con sul tants’ produc-tion of managerial knowledge. When pitching, I often suggested that my research was preoccupied with cross- cultural interactions in a knowledge- based organ ization. But once inside the consultancy, I realized that a focus on the object of consultancy— reflexive managerial knowledge— could be a

22 IntroductIon

selling point in access negotiations. Business anthropologists have become the exemplary reflexive managerial subject (Downey and Fisher 2006), a de-piction that lends itself to corporate collaboration, especially in industries built on a foundation of reflexive knowledge. For example, anthropologists have been able to carry out fieldwork in the industries of advertising and information and technology.41 An anthropologist “for free” could be an attractive proposition if articulated in the right context.

My access was brokered with se nior executives convinced of the efficacy of Systeo’s corporate culture in producing exemplary corporate subjects. “Systeo culture” was frequently invoked as a social totality that would swal-low anything in its path. Even the in situ anthropologist would not be able to escape its effects, a view espoused by one expatriate man ag er who told me, “By the time you leave here you will be Systeofied!” Perplexed by Chinese employees who did not display the desired subjectivity, expatriate man-agement was open to the potential of anthropology to shed light on the situation. Many assumed that the prob lem lay with “Chinese culture”— the intractability of Chinese employees, because of “their culture,” in yielding to Systeo acculturation. But others feared that the in effec tive operation of corporate culture, a concept that was originally devised by management con sul tants, would threaten their status as knowledge experts and thus had potentially negative implications for the proj ect of selling manage-ment knowledge externally. While acting as an En glish trainer to Systeo’s back- office employees, who carry out the routinized work of pro cessing time sheets, expense claims, and arranging business travel for con sul tants, I was invited to participate in an internal management proj ect concern-ing Systeo’s corporate culture— the “ Human Capital Strategy Program.” The ostensibly overlapping content of anthropological and consulting expertise— that of culture— surely facilitated, if not informed, the invita-tion. And with this position came an alternative means of producing an-thropological knowledge— collaboration.

Traditionally, anthropologists have sought to adopt the role of a “detached observer.” Such an approach can be traced to the pioneering fieldwork of Bronislaw Malinowski, the founding father of British social anthropology, who suggested that anthropologists should become immersed in everyday life, but never so much that they truly become native. Without maintaining some analytical distance, it would become impossible to objectify and thus analyze the “native point of view.” However, in recent years, anthropologists

IntroductIon 23

carry ing out fieldwork in “nontraditional” field sites, such as technology companies, trading rooms, and nongovernmental organ izations, have sought alternative approaches. In such settings, detached observation is all but impossible— walking around an office with clipboard in hand, scrib-bling down notes, and then retreating to your “tent” would likely alienate you from your in for mants. Nor would detached observation be desirable when studying experts who produce reflexive knowledge, for the ethno-graphic object in these contexts is not a domain of knowledge that could become potentially “contaminated” by the anthropologist’s involvement. Rather, the aim is to unpack the ethnographic sensibilities foundational to the expertise of in for mants, an aim that can only be carried out through the premise of collaboration or partnership.42

Once firmly ensconced in Systeo’s Human Capital Strategy Program, I offered to design a piece of research for Systeo that addressed a moment of unsettlement, the “crisis” of per for mance management that had ap-parently besieged Systeo’s China practice. As I describe in greater detail in chapter  2, per for mance management— which is not just something that Systeo implements in its clientele, but also a system of evaluation it operates in- house— was deemed to be “not working” in its China arm. I realized that this rupture in normal operation was a rare opportunity to push for greater access. Until then I was largely confined to Systeo’s Bei-jing consulting office, which meant I could not observe how consultancy “travels” to their clients. By proposing to merge my research agenda with a few internal management priorities, I gained more support from se nior executives— key gatekeepers— and thus was able to obtain the kind of ac-cess that facilitated an examination into what consultancies do. Effectively I was treated as an unpaid external con sul tant to Systeo— a position that conferred access to the hr department, internal corporate training, and entry to a number of “client sites” as well as the vari ous consulting offices in its China practice.43 However, after a year of access, my motivations for carry ing out work without remuneration started to be questioned. Thus, for the last few months of fieldwork I took on a contractor role in the Cor-porate Social Responsibility (csr) division, paid at the rate of a local in-tern, 100 yuan ($14) a day, in which I helped to coordinate local csr initia-tives in the China practice.44

It is instructive here to emphasize that my primary objective was not to research the interior lives of Systeo employees, but rather the modes

24 IntroductIon

of analy sis that characterize their expertise, an approach that reflects the para- ethnographic character of expertise in this context. A term devised by Douglas Holmes and George Marcus, para- ethnography encapsulates the par tic u lar relationship that experts have to the knowledge of which they are inscribed as experts. To understand their expertise— what con sul tants do—is to focus on the analytical frame of management consulting. There-fore, I did not conduct extensive life histories with my in for mants, or re-search collaborators as I call them, which is not to say I did not spend a considerable amount of time and effort getting to know them. The ambigu-ity of my own status in Systeo meant that, if anything, I needed to pay extra attention to the issues of trust and confidentiality, and it was impor tant for me to form robust relationships with employees of all levels of se niority. In part this was achieved by carry ing out fifty- nine interviews with Systeo employees of all ranks, those working in the outsourcing and consulting divisions. The material gathered from these interviews does not form the main bulk of the data drawn upon in this book, but rather fulfilled my research collaborators’ notions of what “research” consisted of, and helped to solidify my status as an in de pen dent researcher. Also, I periodically sent reports to the hr director, updating her of my activities and preliminary findings during fieldwork.

Although the official language of Systeo is En glish, fieldwork was carried out in a number of languages: Mandarin, En glish, and Cantonese. Com-munication between Chinese workers was often carried out in Mandarin, the national language of China, but the presence of just one non- Mandarin speaker (usually an expatriate) would cause the conversation to switch to En glish. And among expatriate man ag ers who came from the former colo-nies of Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, Cantonese was the language of preference. Indeed, my own Malaysian Chinese parents are Cantonese speakers, although once they moved to Britain in the 1970s they chose, like many immigrants with aspirations for socioeconomic mobility, to speak En glish at home. Thus, I am unable to speak Cantonese but can un-derstand it fairly well. My proficiency in Mandarin is certainly far superior, having lived and studied in China for almost one and a half years prior to fieldwork. That said, I entered Systeo unconfident of my abilities to com-municate in Mandarin in a business setting, and although my linguistic ability improved rapidly once I moved to the Beijing office and started working, I was always anxious that my errors in grammar and intonation

IntroductIon 25

would undermine my credibility in a setting paranoid about professional-ism. Language demands were exceedingly high, not least because many meetings were conducted through the medium of conference calls. With-out face- to- face contact, the pressure to communicate clearly increased considerably, and my listening abilities were also tested to their maximum. Furthermore, passing as Chinese undoubtedly increased the expectations of Chinese employees, who often spoke to me as if I were a native speaker.

In addition to participant observation and interviews, I also collected a host of written materials during fieldwork, which I draw upon considerably in my analy sis. These mainly consist of Systeo lit er a ture, including train-ing materials, internally produced white papers, and information drawn from their intranet system (an internal website used to disseminate news and which gives a sense of how Systeo, the corporation, narrates itself) and their external website. All of these were obtained with the permission of my research collaborators, who gave me copies of materials or, in the case of the intranet system, or ga nized my online access. It should be noted that this willingness to share materials emerged only once my position as a con sul tant of culture was established and I had begun to collaborate with the com pany.

In agreement with the terms of access I negotiated with Systeo se nior management, I have referred to the organ ization, its clients, and its em-ployees by pseudonyms, trying my best to obfuscate their identities by changing identifying features, unless a feature is critical to the argumenta-tion. In the case of employees, this may include their hometown, gender, or exact position in the com pany hierarchy. Aiding my attempts to maintain anonymity is the high turnover of Systeo’s China practice. Since I left, a large number of employees have also left the com pany, including many key gatekeepers. And perhaps this is what lies at the heart of fieldwork anx i eties in such a setting— the sense that you only ever have one shot at capturing “fast capitalism” (Holmes and Marcus 2006). Fast, in this con-text, does not mean short fieldwork, but rather depicts the fleetingness of the relations that govern this kind of fieldwork. Every offer of access, of an employee offering to be interviewed, or taking time out to explain an it system, or allowing me to partake in corporate training, had to be capital-ized on as quickly as pos si ble, for one never knew when, or if, that oppor-tunity would come around again. It is also this very fleetingness that limits the possibility of future contact between the anthropologist and the field.

26 IntroductIon

cultures of commensuration

This book follows a nascent yet vibrant field of anthropology that explores the cultural and social constitution of con temporary financial capitalism. Reversing the discipline’s traditional preoccupation with the marginalized and dispossessed, the anthropology of finance focuses predominantly on elites operating at the center of the global economy. Experts and expert practices have come under scrutiny, as well as the knowledges they draw upon, create, and manipulate.45 In addition to investigating how financial value is produced,46 such scholarship has shown that discourses of finan-cialization cannot, in and of themselves, explain the sweeping changes that are happening in the global economy.

In her portrait of Wall Street, Karen Ho demonstrates that investment bankers, despite upholding and propagating shareholder value as their key mission statement, actually create waves of stock market volatility, which see share prices crash as much as they rise. To resolve this tension, Ho looks at the institutional culture of Wall Street, examining how it connects to the financialization of public corporations on Main Street. Vividly describing the “culture of smartness” and “hard work” to which bankers are subjected, Ho shows how there is “no pure, unmediated shareholder value”; rather, “its meaning and constitution change over time, are dependent on power relations, and are enacted through par tic u lar cultural and institutional contexts” (Ho 2009, 168). Bankers’ actions are shaped by their own local-ized experiences of instability and job insecurity—it is these experiences, rather than an abstract discourse of shareholder value, that they draw on to legitimize the destructive short- term orientation to which they subject their clients. Similarly, we should not assume that shareholder value ideol-ogy necessarily informs management con sul tants’ understandings of their work, or that con sul tants justify their interventions by recourse to the cre-ation of shareholder value.

In the coming chapters it will become apparent that the ways in which management con sul tants establish meaning and achieve legitimacy for their actions depend greatly on techniques of commensuration. Rather than stress-ing one par tic u lar order of worth, the analy sis reveals the variegated reg-isters of value— which can pertain to local cultural tropes, orga nizational values, as well as financial value— that inform con sul tants’ interventions. In par tic u lar, I focus on how orders of worth come to be legitimized by

IntroductIon 27

attending to pro cesses of valorization, that is, the attempts to elicit equiva-lences between diff er ent value scales. The impor tant role that management con sul tants play in the organ ization of work, and the financialization of economic activity and labor, can be traced to the production of what I call “cultures of commensuration.”

Cultures of commensuration are integral to the creation of value “be-yond the point of production” (Willmott 2010), which has become char-acteristic of the financialized economy. Brands have become “ ‘objects’ that can be monetized and leveraged” (Willmott 2010, 525), and branding is now considered an integral aspect of business that involves the man-agement of “intangible assets” that feed into market capitalization.47 We find that companies, usually technology firms, can have disputable poten-tial income streams and still have staggering market valuations. Indeed, the specter that surrounds many a start- up’s initial public offering, even after the dotcom crash, highlights anthropologist Anna Tsing’s point that spectacle can, in and of itself, be a means of conjuring value.48 In short, we find the creation of financial assets from what was hitherto impossible depends on the production of the “right” repre sen ta tions through which equivalences are drawn between the intangible and the tangible, between the invisible and the vis i ble.

In the financialized economy, mechanisms of exploitation and expro-priation, and thus the production of in equality, can also be traced to the production of certain representations— representations of labor produc-tivity that suggest that some constituents are more deserving of value than others. Such repre sen ta tions make ethical claims and produce ethical di-lemmas. Are shareholders the rightful owners of public companies? Is the value of the American ceo’s contribution greater than that of the back- office worker in China? On what basis can we decide whose contribution is more valuable? These questions can be answered by examining the knowl-edge practices that visualize productivity and, more generally, make im-material value tangible. Increasingly, we find that what counts as value is that which can be counted.49 This is especially the case when it comes to evaluations of “performance”—of individual workers, departments, and companies. It has been much remarked that the regimes of per for mance mea sure ment and objective setting that management con sul tants sell have the pernicious effects of eroding trust, professionalism, and autonomy.50 The analy sis I pres ent extends these observations, demonstrating that

28 IntroductIon

per for mance measurement— and other techniques of commensuration promulgated by consultants— also produces new ethics and ontological effects.

Consultancies are engaged in producing “values” in the so cio log i cal sense— notions of what is desirable or good— and “value” in the economic sense, the degree to which objects are desired. Here I draw on anthropologist David Graeber’s theory of value, which takes as its starting point the evalu-ation of actions (rather than things) and is concerned with what people see as a good and proper life, deploying a mode of analy sis that trammels these multiple conceptions of value.51 Graeber argues that values and value “ really are refractions of the same thing” (2001, 78)— what is critical is the media in which value can be realized, which can range from money to symbolic per for mances. Con sul tants are well aware of the importance of media and mediation to the realization of value. Their obsessive use of Power Point is a case in point. A piece of software designed to automate the production of visual repre sen ta tions, Power Point has also led to radical changes to the epistemologies of workplaces, through its use as a technology of persua-sion.52 Moreover, Power Point acts as a crucial prop in the production of a professionalized ethic and the substantiation of expertise. One of the “de-liverables” (outputs of consultancy) that Systeo supplies to their clients is a Power Point that both describes the act(s) of consulting— typically, the it installation that they carry out— and also inscribes these acts with an ethos of professionalism.53 It is as a device of ethics, rather than “pure” repre sen-ta tion, that con sul tants plow extensive effort into the production of these documents, leading them to acquire a dazzling proficiency with Power Point over the course of their careers.

Through repre sen ta tions, typically metrological representations (charts, tables, graphs, maps), consultants are able to link together— commensurate— diff er ent value registers, value, and values. Anthropologist Jane Guyer has pointed out that a priori connections between diff er ent scales of value do not exist; rather, they are pegged together through the per for mance or enact-ment of propositions. For example, there is no reason why one’s work per-for mance should be defined by one’s contribution to profitability. Rather, it is through techniques of mea sur ing labor productivity that a par tic u lar ethical proposition about per for mance is created, and thus tie per for mance to prof-itability rather than, say, acts of collegiality. Sociologist David Stark has argued that value is created through pro cesses of evaluation— the drawing

IntroductIon 29

of equivalences between diff er ent logics of worth.54 His suggestion is to de-velop a concept of accounts— a term that encompasses both narration and evaluative princi ples: “[I]t is always within accounts that we ‘size up the situation,’ for not every form of worth can be made to apply and not every asset is in a form mobilizable for a given situation” (Stark 2000, 17). Meth-ods of per for mance evaluation create a story of labor productivity whereby certain logics of worth are made to apply, and through which individual workers are made to account for their everyday work.

These techniques of valuation, however, are not necessarily designed to give stable constructions of value. In fact, one could say that the edifice of management consulting is built on the tensions between diff er ent— often oppositional— registers of value. From my position inside the manage-ment consultancy, I found that the everyday practices of financialization could not be explained as reflecting a singular driver of change such as “the rise of shareholder value.” Improving orga nizational per for mance does not simply refer only to increasing share prices, and financialization cannot be defined as merely the ascendancy of financial worth. Rather, con sul tants’ expertise acquires meaning through unresolved tensions between shifting, relationally constructed oppositions that are formed in the par tic u lar his-torical moment. In this book I show how consulting work draws on an opposition between “Chinese” and “Western” modernities, that map onto a binary of desirable and undesirable subjectivities. I also demonstrate that inherent in the objective of producing profitability and other finan-cial repre sen ta tions connected to share valuation is an opposition between revenue generation and cost generation, which, in turn, dissimulates as a binary of front- and back- office workers. In par tic u lar, I draw attention to the fragility of such oppositions by examining the boundary practices through which their meaning is produced. In doing so, I seek to question basic economic categories and pro cesses, and reveal the instability and polysemic nature of key consulting terms.

Anthropologists of expertise have long demonstrated that the substan-tiation of expertise comes not from what experts have but rather what they do. For management con sul tants, who possess neither proprietary knowl-edge nor specialist accreditation, this is especially apparent. Management consultancy exemplifies the claim that expertise is “semiotically accom-plished” (Carr 2010, 27) with the naturalization of their actions as an enactment of specialist, already acquired knowledge being especially

30 IntroductIon

impor tant. I suggest that the power of management con sul tants, who con-tinue to be hired in spite of their failure to deliver on their promises, de-rives from their capacity to naturalize the moral actions of restructuring and other forms of intervention as purely economic or technocratic. Forms of consulting speak are integral to this endeavor, as exemplified by the trope of “best practice.” It is a term that derives rhetorical force from the impli-cation that there is one universal scale of evaluation for management or orga nizational practices. Those deemed the best can, indeed should, be implemented across comparable entities. But how do we decide what is best? How can people be convinced that such practices are best? In other words, how can one scale of value be foregrounded over others? How are other scales of value rendered invisible in the legitimizing of consulting interventions? Management consultancy, I argue, is not simply the imple-mentation of orga nizational practices, but rather is concerned with the fashioning of ethical proj ects by which these practices become thinkable and accepted.55 It is the making of “the best”— the ethical nexus in which practices are judged and valued, but then naturalized as value- free.

Structure of the Book

Each chapter in this book focuses on a diff er ent instantiation of commen-suration that con sul tants practice and help to propagate, to build a rich portrait of the cultures of commensuration that inform the financialization of work and labor in the con temporary global economy.

Chapter 1 looks at the discourse and practices of making “high per for-mance,” a term that is invoked to describe the impact of consulting and is associated with human resource management (hrm). Described as the re-invention of personnel management as an object of strategy, hrm stresses the importance of “ people” for corporate financial per for mance. This chapter is based on material gathered during my time with Systeo’s Human Capital Strategy Program, an initiative depicted as a testing ground for high- performance work practices, a place where they can be practiced and refined before being sold to clients. Providing a rare insight into how hrm operates in practice, the analy sis unpacks the epistemological logics that underpin the rhetorical claims of hrm. Narrated as an organ ization’s great-est “asset,” employees are encouraged through regimes of “culture” to stay, engage with, and commit to the firm. However, by looking at how high

IntroductIon 31

per for mance is mea sured and made material through repre sen ta tional devices, we find an alternative configuration of labor, one which is com-patible with the practices of downsizing and outsourcing that have also proliferated in recent years. Practices of high per for mance commensurate labor with financial return to produce financialized subjects.

In chapters 2 and 3 I explore in greater detail how the financialization of labor is enacted and operationalized, again drawing on the internal prac-tice and refinement of management forms that Systeo goes on to imple-ment in their clients. Chapter 2 looks at per for mance management, a form of labor assessment that is closely associated with the rise of audit culture. Drawing on the dozens of interviews I conducted with con sul tants and hr staff, and observations of per for mance rating meetings, this chapter examines the politics of evaluation— the discourse and practices by which per for mance management can be performed as a meritocratic system of assessment. The intricacies of rating and ranking employees, who are sub-ject to both absolute and relative judgments of worth, reveal the central-ity of commensuration for per for mance evaluation. I focus especially on the pro cesses by which an equivalence between labor productivity and fi-nancial value is produced, and how this is then translated into a notion of “per for mance.” Through mea sures that equate time with the creation of revenue, con sul tants are incentivized to perform their designation as “revenue generators”— employees who contribute to the creation of share-holder value.

Revenue generators form one part of a dyad of financialized subjectivi-ties. They are defined in opposition to “cost generators,” who are usually found in supporting, back- office roles. Based on fieldwork inside Systeo’s shared ser vice center (ssc) in Dalian, chapter 3 elucidates how cost gen-erators are constructed by examining “shared services”— a form of orga-nizational restructuring that sees white- collar work sent to offshore plat-forms in the global South. Focusing on the organ ization of work under financialization, this chapter analyzes how outsourcing of this kind can be justified as a means of “reducing costs.” I demonstrate that the shape that outsourcing takes, and the practices of work standardization and rou-tinization, devalues the activity of ssc workers. The productivity of these workers is denied, a finding all the more remarkable given the potency of shared services— the pro cess of aggregation which this kind of outsourcing is based upon—to generate income. Techniques of commensuration create

32 IntroductIon

value hierarchies between diff er ent employees, some of whom are deemed to create revenue, others only cost. Although these repre sen ta tions do not give accurate depictions of employees’ contributions and productivity, they nevertheless circumscribe their existence within organ izations, leading to heightened experiences of instability and precarity for all but the most elite groups of employees.

Chapter  4 identifies the importance of commensuration for selling consultancy and establishing the legitimacy of their expertise. Drawing primarily on participant observation of training for mid- level con sul tants (ranked as man ag ers and se nior man ag ers), this chapter analyzes the log-ics of worth that con sul tants are exposed to when being trained to “create value.” Rather than postulating a specific body of knowledge or skills as the basis of their expertise, the analy sis reveals how con sul tants are taught to moralize and politicize their interventions and the productivity of dis-sonance for this endeavor. Specifically, we see how consulting expertise is stabilized through the use of analogy— equivalences are drawn between leadership values and Chinese moral philosophy, between the subjectivity of clients and the values of financialization, their techniques of resolving uncertainty and the derivation of “truth” and “the facts.” I draw attention to the diff er ent scales of economy that con sul tants must learn to switch be-tween, and how commensuration is used to emphasize the impact of their interventions and create an ethical remit for consulting.

In chapter 5 we see how consultancy travels, as the analy sis moves from Systeo’s offices to its client sites. As part of the aforementioned research into per for mance management, I visited the Beijing offices of a multinational com pany and a Chinese state- owned enterprise (soe). Both had hired Sys-teo to implement an enterprise system, yet consulting practice and con-sul tants’ be hav ior differed greatly between these two clients. Spending months if not years with their clients, con sul tants learn that their work is characterized by a pervasive experience of liminality. Problematizing the notion that management consulting can be reduced to the per for mance of an abstract professionalism, I argue that con sul tants actively adopt forms of embodied be hav ior that respond to clients’ expectations, norms, and values; they establish moral proj ects of consultancy specific to each client. Demonstrating that financialization need not engender the expulsion of nonfinancial logics, Systeo’s work to prepare a Chinese soe for stock market flotation acquires legitimacy by incorporating local models of modernization

IntroductIon 33

and subject formation that elevate the state. Although discourses of “best practice” suggest that consulting is the pro cess of making emerging econo-mies commensurate with the West, here we find that management consult-ing is made commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and post- Mao modernity.

Chapter 6 delves more deeply into how local tropes and models of trans-formation are incorporated into management consulting by focusing on the vernacular ethics of expertise. Despite choosing to work for a foreign consultancy and embracing a distinctly global identity, Chinese con sul-tants are motivated by sentiments of patriotism, and see their interventions as acts of loyalty to the Chinese nation as much as a triumph of technologi-cal expertise. This seeming contradiction is reconciled through an ethics of patriotic professionalism that links together “individual professional development with national proj ects of state- strengthening” (Hoffman 2010, 6). Chinese con sul tants draw equivalences between their individual proj-ects of cultivating a cosmopolitan identity and their consulting proj ects of transforming Chinese soes into global, financialized companies— they are both actions that seek to create a more modern and more power ful China.

The final substantive chapter looks at official regimes of corporate eth-icizing, that of “corporate social responsibility” (csr). Based on my final months of fieldwork when I was a contractor in the csr division, chapter 7 demonstrates how initiatives designed to improve “corporate citizenship”— which include a charity bike ride across the mountains of Sichuan— incommensurate and commensurate scales of financial and nonfinancial value. On the one hand, internal csr initiatives are narrated as examples of corporate praxis that are not informed by the pursuit of profit—in this way a moral consciousness is produced. On the other hand, csr is practiced with the view to improving employee engagement, that is, increasing em-ployees’ capacity to create shareholder return. In short, a central contradic-tion of csr is that moral legitimacy is drawn through the per for mance of extra- financial concerns, yet moral authority is generated for the purposes of finance.

Across the chapters a common theme emerges— the centrality of ethics for management consulting. In answer to the question posed at the be-ginning of this book— What do con sul tants do?— I suggest that manage-ment consulting is concerned with the creation of a legitimate ethical proj-ect, through which the financialization of economic activity and labor is

34 IntroductIon

achieved. This ethical proj ect consists of practices of commensuration that bring together an array of value scales— financial value, social values, and state- promoted values of “ human quality,” high socialist values of the Chi-nese collective. Through management consultancy we see how finan-cialization is enacted and altered through the interface with Chinese state capitalism. Far from posing a threat to the per for mance of financialization, local discourses and practices that emphasize the ongoing importance of state power help management con sul tants to enact forms of best practice.

notes

Introduction

1 http:// www . guardian . co . uk / society / 2009 / jun / 04 / nhs - management - con sultancy - costs, last accessed December 30, 2015. See also “MoD [Ministry of Defence] pays cost- cutters £3,950 a day” (The In de pen dent, October 27, 2011), http:// www . independent . co . uk / news / uk / politics / mod - costcutters - paid - 3950 - a - day - 2376580 . html (accessed December 30, 2015).

2 Con Tricks: The Shadowy World of Management Consultancy and How to Make It Work for You is a highly critical account of the consulting industry written by a former management con sul tant (Ashford 1998).

3 Georgina Born’s ethnography, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the bbc (2004), gives an insight into the role of management con sul tants in the restructuring of the bbc. According to Born, the bbc spent approximately £22 million a year on con sul tants in the 1990s (2004, 218).

4 See McKenna 2006, chapter 2. 5 I had wanted to compare the practices of reason that inhere in a Eu ro pean or

American com pany, with those in an Asian one. Dalian is the world leader in North Asian outsourcing, in part due to structural advantages conferred by its proximity to Japan and South Korea. However, I soon learned that this would be impossible. In the formal and informal pitches, I realized that one of the primary concerns was confidentiality— these high- tech companies appeared to be paranoid about what they saw as their intellectual property (for a detailed discussion, see Kessler 2006) and would almost certainly refuse access to an outsider who was also associated with a competing firm. Given that I don’t speak Japa nese or Korean, it was obvious that I would narrow the scope of my study to Eu ro pean or American firms only.

6 See Ong (2006a, 2006b). 7 Systeo is a pseudonym. As part of my terms of access, I agreed to anonymize the

management consultancy and all of its employees. 8 This definition of consultancy as parasitic action can also be found in academic

scholarship (see Clegg, Kornberger, and Rhodes 2004). 9 See Tsing (2005), Ong and Collier (2005). 10 For example, see MacKenzie (2006), MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu (2007). 11 See Thrift (2005).

204 notES to IntroductIon

12 Lisa Hoffman (2006) points out that this assertion is based on an erroneous equation of neoliberalism with unfettered markets, created through the ab-sence of state intervention. She reminds us of the considerable state interven-tion required to create so- called free markets.

13 Anthropologist Ellen Oxfeld (1993) is one of many authors who have ques-tioned the existence of a specifically Chinese capitalism, alternatively known as “Confucian capitalism.” On the whole, such tropes of fetishized capitalism contend that there is something distinctly “Chinese” about the economic pro-cesses currently occurring within China and across its borders, and propound notions such as the idea of a uniquely Chinese business culture, or of cultural/ethnic affinity between diasporic and mainland Chinese people, which facilitates economic interaction (Hofheinz and Calder 1982; Redding 1993).

14 Explicit disclosure can be found in the form of white papers published by con-sultancies, including Systeo, and also the websites of soes, which often name their corporate advisors.

15 This can be partly attributed to the bias toward macro- level analyses of enter-prise reform (qiye gaige), which do not capture the subtle pro cesses of enact-ment that defines the ground- level transformations that consultancies carry out. Broadly speaking, this bias reflects the division of labor between academic disciplines. Economists and po liti cal scientists have examined China’s insti-tutional changes at the macro level. And anthropologists and sociologists of China who are well placed to carry out a ground- level study have rarely looked at the agents of change— the mediating institutions of capitalism. Instead, their focus has been on changes to local communities, labor, kinship structures, and migration that can be connected to the reform of state- owned enterprises and the diversification of owner ship structure in China to permit the entry and pro-liferation of foreign- invested firms (see Chan 2001; Lee 1998; Pun 2005; Rofel 1999; Solinger 1999).

16 Many of China’s National Champions feature in the top ranks of the Financial Times list of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization, which is published annually.

17 In this proj ect I analyzed over forty interviews that investigated how profes-sional fund man ag ers, from the United States and the United Kingdom, made investment decisions. This proj ect, which concerns more broadly the role of narratives and emotions in decision making, uncovered how culturalist con-cerns about Chinese state- owned enterprises frequently appeared in what we have termed “conviction narratives”— narratives that fund man ag ers draw on to generate conviction in their decisions under conditions of radical uncer-tainty (discussed further in chapter 1).

18 See Fishman (2005). 19 See Michael Faust cited in Kipping and Engwall (2002, 39). 20 In recent times, extreme versions of the culturalist account have gained in popu-

larity, especially in the United States. They commonly contend that a questionable

notES to IntroductIon 205

Chinese morality, without a liberal democracy to keep its motivations in check, is liable to harness markets for the purpose of national empowerment— the so- called China threat—an assertion that Steinfeld’s book Playing Our Game (2010) addresses squarely in its refutation. For another denunciation of the “China threat” assertion, see http:// www . newyorker . com / online / blogs / johncassidy / 2010 / 12 / the - china - threat . html (accessed December 30, 2015).

21 For an explanation of the relationship between the stock market and mass lay-offs in the United States, see Ho (2009).

22 There is a considerable body of lit er a ture that documents the mass layoffs at state- owned enterprises since the second phase of market reforms, for example, Chan (2001) and Steinfeld (1998). However, official discussion was prevented by classifying any information regarding the layoffs as a state secret, according to McGregor. In his book The Party, he describes his initial surprise at the refusal of Chinese state bank executives, who presided over national banks soon to be listed, to discuss the topic, given that job cuts would be seen favorably by foreign investors (McGregor 2010, 50). It would seem that although Chinese soes adopt practices similar to Western companies, the explicit disclosure of these practices, prob ably because they threaten the party’s po liti cal legitimacy, is being hushed up.

23 See Wright and Kipping (2012). 24 For a discussion on the periodization of modern management, see Keulen and

Kroeze (2014). 25 See Wren and Bedeian (2009). 26 Writing about the rise of (business pro cess) reengineering, Fincham examines

“the pro cess concept,” noting how it was spawned through “a collaboration be-tween academic, consultancy and corporate interests— Ivy League universities, major consultancies and large corporations— which fed into orga nizational change paradigms particularly around the mid-1980s” (Fincham and Evans 1999, 35).

27 Management con sul tants have also been responsible for importing per for-mance management— management by per for mance objectives, per for mance targets, and per for mance standards— into the public sector. This has been termed new managerialism or new public management.

28 See Lazonick and O’ Sullivan (2000), Williams (2000), Boyer (2000). 29 Lazonick (2010) describes this as the shift to the “New Economy Business Model,”

which could be traced to the success of open standards technology, beginning with the ibm pc and its “Wintel” architecture. Without proprietary technology to invest in, companies were less inclined to invest in and retain their employees (who had acquired the skills and know- how to use and develop these technolo-gies), and saw instead the cost benefits of maintaining a lean workforce supple-mented by contractors.

30 See Lazonick cited in Milberg (2011), Milberg (2008), Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington (2008).

31 See Krippner (2005, 2011), Lapavitsas (2014).

206 notES to IntroductIon

32 See Lazonick (2010). 33 Other kinds of enterprise systems include those of customer relationship man-

agement (crm) and supply- chain management (scm), which Systeo also installs. 34 See Head (2014), chapter 7. 35 The kind of labor is also diff er ent; while strategy- oriented consultancies tend to

almost exclusively hire mba gradu ates, it- related consultancies prefer it and engineering experts, often hired straight out of university.

36 Based on a survey of sixty- three small and medium- sized enterprises and large firms (Xu and Quaddus 2013, 113). Total owner ship of an erp system ranges from $400,000 to $30 million (Xu and Quaddus 2013).

37 See sap (1999a, 1999b, 2004). 38 For more detail on Gantt’s man rec ord chart, and how it preempted the use of

per for mance incentives in the Netherlands, see Dix (2014). 39 See Tuckett (2011) for the importance of management, specifically the percep-

tion and detailing of “good management,” and including managerial infrastruc-ture, in influencing the context in which investors make decisions about which stocks to buy and hold.

40 The cultural cir cuit of capital also includes business schools and management gurus (Thrift 2005).

41 For ethnographic research on and within the advertising industry, see Moeran (2006), Mazzarella (2003). For the information technology sector, see Cefkin (2009), Nafus and Anderson (2006).

42 As a consequence, in for mants are also reframed, as Douglas Holmes and George Marcus put it, as “collaborators or partners in research, a fiction to be sus-tained more or less strongly around the key issue of the postulation of para- ethnography as the object of research” (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 248).

43 Systeo’s Greater China practice has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Taiwan. I either worked in or visited all the offices, with the exceptions of Guangzhou and Taiwan.

44 Throughout the book, Chinese yuan is translated into U.S. dollars at an exchange rate of 1 yuan to $7, the average exchange rate during fieldwork (2007 to 2009).

45 See Zaloom (2006), Riles (2011), Miyazaki (2013), Maurer (2005). 46 See Lee and LiPuma (2004), Ortiz (2014), Lepinay (2011), Poon and Wosnitzer

(2012). 47 See Arvidsson (2005, 2011), Moor (2007), Foster (2007). 48 See Tsing (2000). 49 Accounting scholars have long pointed out that accounting metrics are critical

to the structuring of valuation decisions, making vis i ble, and so foregrounding, certain priorities and thus providing an epistemological basis upon which re-structuring is carried out (see also chapters 2 and 3). The social effects of audit amount not to the par tic u lar cultural values it purportedly mobilizes ( whether of neoliberalism or socialism), but rather pertain to how audit is, in itself, a means of creating value through mea sure ment.

notES to cHAPtEr onE 207

50 See Strathern (2000). 51 In Graeber’s review of existing anthropological approaches to value, he mentions

a third concept, value in the linguistic sense (which stems from the structural lin-guistics of Ferdinand de Saussure)— glossed as “meaningful difference” (Graeber 2001).

52 See Stark and Paraval (2008). 53 See Yates and Orlikowski (2007). 54 In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the concept of worth, partic-

ularly among economic sociologists. See Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), Stark (2000), Beckert and Aspers (2011), Berthoin Antal, Hutter, and Stark (2015).

55 Thus exemplifying Carr’s point that “successful enactments of expertise hinge on the would-be expert’s ability to establish an interpretive frame through which to view that object” (Carr 2010, 23).

chapter 1. High Performers

1 See Beer (2009). Michael Beer is professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is also a cofounder of Truepoint management consultancy.

2 See Sillitoe (2013). Andrew Sillitoe is a con sul tant at Winning Mindsets Consul-tancy, based in the United Kingdom.

3 See Pfeffer (1994, 1998). 4 See Berg (1999), Appelbaum et al. (2000). 5 See Guest (2001). 6 My approach is broadly inspired by the performative turn in the social sciences

(cf. Licoppe 2010), in par tic u lar the growing lit er a ture on the performativity of economics, which has explored how economic realities are “provoked” through repre sen ta tional practices that bring the very objects they describe into being (Muniesa 2014). This chapter shares many common threads with recent work on the performativity of valuation devices (e.g., Doganova and Muniesa 2015; Helgesson and Kjellberg 2013; MacKenzie 2011) and extends existing work that examines the performativity of strategy (e.g., Cabantous and Gond 2011; Car ter, Clegg, and Kornberger 2010; Kornberger and Clegg 2011).

7 In this vein, I continue from the valuable work of anthropologists who consider documents (Riles 2006) and graphical artifacts (M. Hull 2003, 2008, 2012a, 2012b) to be more than repre sen ta tional devices. Instead, they explore their productive effects: the epistemological registers they intervene upon and the epistemological effects they can enact.

8 As Van der Zwan has put it, “shareholder value has been conceptualized as a discursive construct, a language of financial market expectations that operates in de pen dently of a firm’s per for mance” (Van der Zwan 2014, 108). Of relevance to the context of this study, in which Chinese soes seek modernization for flo-tation on international stock exchanges but still retain aspects of state control and influence, Van der Zwan cites the study of Fiss and Zajac (2004), which